On September 29 2014, Israeli president Benjamen Netanyahu delivered a speech to the UN, essentially an apologia for Israeli policies. Not surprisingly, most of Netanyahu’s talk was about Iran.

It is said, referring to the Bohemian lifestyle surrounding Washington Square, that whenever a virgin passes by the statue of Garibaldi in Washington Square Park, he salutes. Something similar can be said about what happens when someone tells the truth from the podium of the UN General Assembly. The September 29 2014 speech delivered there by Israeli president Benjamin Netanyahu was outstanding even by the standards of mendacity set over the decades from that disgraced podium. What follows is an analysis of the speech as it pertains to the Iran crisis.

Netanyahu’s words are in plain text. My comments are in bold.

[O]ur hopes and the world’s hope for peace are in danger. Because everywhere we look, militant Islam is on the march.

It’s not militants. It’s not Islam. It’s militant Islam. Typically, its first victims are other Muslims, but it spares no one. Christians, Jews, Yazidis, Kurds – no creed, no faith, no ethnic group is beyond its sights. And it’s rapidly spreading in every part of the world. You know the famous American saying: “All politics is local”? For the militant Islamists, “All politics is global.” Because their ultimate goal is to dominate the world.

Netanyahu will now proceed to mix Islamic world domination with a caliphate with Islamism at large. Thus, Boko Haram recently declared a caliphate, but has no designs for world domination. And most Islamist groups don’t have a caliphate as part of their political program.

Now, that threat might seem exaggerated to some, since it starts out small, like a cancer that attacks a particular part of the body. But left unchecked, the cancer grows, metastasizing over wider and wider areas. To protect the peace and security of the world, we must remove this cancer before it’s too late. Last week, many of the countries represented here rightly applauded President Obama for leading the effort to confront ISIS. And yet weeks before, some of these same countries, the same countries that now support confronting ISIS, opposed Israel for confronting Hamas.

Which countries? Obviously the countries which feel threatened by ISIS but not Hamas would be grateful for Obama for confronting the former but not the latter. The Western powers had no quarrel with Israel “confronting” Hamas. Obama and many other Western leaders only urged Israel not to exceed a certain level of violence in its assault on Gaza, but none of this had anything to do with opposing Israel for confronting Hamas. In any case, this “paradox” assumes that the Israeli war with Hamas was equivalent to the war with ISIS. And so Netanyahu continues…

They evidently don’t understand that ISIS and Hamas are branches of the same poisonous tree.

ISIS and Hamas share a fanatical creed, which they both seek to impose well beyond the territory under their control.

These words don’t sit well in the mouth of the prime minister of a country which has relentlessly imposed its own will on territories well outside its internationally-recognized boundaries.

Listen to ISIS’s self-declared caliph, Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi. This is what he said two months ago: A day will soon come when the Muslim will walk everywhere as a master… The Muslims will cause the world to hear and understand the meaning of terrorism… and destroy the idol of democracy. Now listen to Khaled Meshaal, the leader of Hamas. He proclaims a similar vision of the future: We say this to the West… By Allah you will be defeated. Tomorrow our nation will sit on the throne of the world.

Even on the terms Netanyahu presents them, if the two quotes are read with any attention, it is clear that they have little in common. Mashaal does not say that the Muslims will be the master everywhere they go; to “sit on the throne of the world” is equivalent to “sit on top of the world” in English and is not to be taken literally, as can be seen in the context, as we will now see. Nor does he say the movement he leads will destroy democracy (although, of course, it is entirely anti-democratic). Nor does he threaten the world with terrorism.

Netanyahu’s rendering of Meshaal’s speech makes it look like Hamas is promoting Muslim world rule. But if you look at the translation by MEMRI, which serves to publish speeches which embarrass Israel’s enemies, but includes material Netanyahu omitted from the text, it is clear that it says nothing of the sort.

We say to this West, which does not act reasonably, and does not learn its lessons: By Allah, you will be defeated. You will be defeated in Palestine, and your defeat there has already begun. True, it is Israel that is being defeated there, but when Israel is defeated, its path is defeated, those who call to support it are defeated, and the cowards who hide behind it and support it are defeated. Israel will be defeated, and so will whoever supported or supports it.

America will be defeated in Iraq. Wherever the [Islamic] nation is targeted, its enemies will be defeated, Allah willing.

Now clearly, Meshaal is referring not to the world at large, and, indeed, not even the Muslim world as a whole (Afghanistan, for instance, is not mentioned in the speech reproduced in MEMRI), but the Arab world.

Fully ten minutes later, he provides the rest of the speech which Netanyahu links with ellipses. (Ellipses in the following quote are from MEMRI.)

Tomorrow, our nation will sit on the throne of the world. This is not a figment of the imagination, but a fact. Tomorrow we will lead the world, Allah willing. Apologize today, before remorse will do you no good. Our nation is moving forwards, and it is in your interest to respect a victorious nation.

[…]

Our nation will be victorious. When it reaches the leadership of the world, and controls its own decisions, then it will prevent this overt interference [in our affairs], and its pillaging of natural resources, and will prevent these recurring offenses against our land, against our nation, and against our holy places – then you will regret it.

Again, if Meshaal was promoting Muslim world rule, as Netanyahu expects his listeners to believe, there would be no point in talking about foreign interference in the affairs of the Muslim world, or protecting its wealth from being pillaged.

But even al-Baghdidi’s speech does not clearly refer, as Netanyahu would have it, to world domination. A reading of the translation provided by MEMRI indicates that it speaks, instead, to a revival of Muslim power and a restoration of Muslim dignity. Since the subject at hand is not ISIS per se, I won’t go into details. My readers can read for themselves.

As Hamas’s charter makes clear, Hamas’s immediate goal is to destroy Israel. But Hamas has a broader objective. They also want a caliphate.

Pretty much any pious Muslim, if asked, will reply that he or she “wants” a caliphate. But there is no indication that a caliphate is part of Hamas’ program. In any case, there is no evidence that Hamas has a caliphate as part of its program.

Hamas shares the global ambitions of its fellow militant Islamists.

Militant Islamist groups have different global goals, some including a caliphate, some with more parochial concerns. The Taliban, Hezbollah, and the Islamic Republic of Iran, for example, have not raised the banner of a caliphate. Boco Haram raised this slogan only recently and in no way is this one of its “global ambitions.” Indeed, Islamists that have are a distinct minority.

That’s why its supporters wildly cheered in the streets of Gaza as thousands of Americans were murdered on 9/11.

And that’s why its leaders condemned the United States for killing Osama Bin Laden, whom they praised as a holy warrior.

We haven’t located the full statement. An article in The Guardian writes:

The author of the article reports that in the statement referred to, Hamas Gaza president Ismail Haniyeh noted doctrinal differences between Bin Laden’s al-Qaida and Hamas which sees itself as primarily a nationalist movement rather than an international movement (pace Netanyahu). Haniyeh added: “We condemn the assassination and the killing of an Arab holy warrior. We ask God to offer him mercy with the true believers and the martyrs.”

So when it comes to their ultimate goals, Hamas is ISIS and ISIS is Hamas.

And what they share in common, all militant Islamists share in common: • Boko Haram in Nigeria; • Ash-Shabab in Somalia; • Hezbollah in Lebanon; • An-Nusrah in Syria; • The Mahdi Army in Iraq; • And the Al-Qaeda branches in Yemen, Libya, the Philippines, India and elsewhere.

Some are radical Sunnis, some are radical Shi’ites. Some want to restore a pre-medieval caliphate from the 7th century. Others want to trigger the apocalyptic return of an imam from the 9th century. They operate in different lands, they target different victims and they even kill each other in their quest for supremacy. But they all share a fanatic ideology. They all seek to create ever expanding enclaves of militant Islam where there is no freedom and no tolerance – Where women are treated as chattel, Christians are decimated, and minorities are subjugated, sometimes given the stark choice: convert or die. For them, anyone can be an infidel, including fellow Muslims.

Again, this is not true. Women are oppressed in Iran, but are hardly treated as chattel, the way women are treated in territory controlled by Boko Haram and ISIS. Nor are Christians being decimated in Iran or, for that matter, by Hezbollah in Lebanon.

Ladies and Gentlemen, Militant Islam’s ambition to dominate the world seems mad. But so too did the global ambitions of another fanatic ideology that swept to power eight decades ago.

The Nazis believed in a master race. The militant Islamists believe in a master faith. They just disagree about who among them will be the master… of the master faith. That’s what they truly disagree about. Therefore, the question before us is whether militant Islam will have the power to realize its unbridled ambitions.

There is one place where that could soon happen: The Islamic State of Iran. For 35 years, Iran has relentlessly pursued the global mission which was set forth by its founding ruler, Ayatollah Khomeini, in these words: We will export our revolution to the entire world. Until the cry “There is no God but Allah” will echo throughout the world over… And ever since, the regime’s brutal enforcers, Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, have done exactly that.

If Iran has relentlessly pursued its global mission for 35 years, it has little enough to show for it. Its influence is limited to the Shia world, and the bulk of its success in this regard was handed to it by the Bush administration in overthrowing Saddam Hussein and the Taleban. Otherwise, this is purely aspirational and not operational.

Listen to its current commander, General Muhammad Ali Ja’afari. And he clearly stated this goal. He said: Our Imam did not limit the Islamic Revolution to this country… Our duty is to prepare the way for an Islamic world government…

It’s not impossible that he said such a thing, although the only sources I’ve found in English for this quote are all from pro-Israel sources. (It seems to have originated with Amir Taheri, a notoriously unreliable source. See his 2008 article (where, inter alia, he manages to utterly mangle the American expression Crazy Eddie). It appears at greater length in his book Persian Night, published a year later.2 Although he never provided a source for this quote, it is cited in The Rise of Nuclear Iran: How Tehran Defies the West by former Israeli ambassador to the UN Dore Gold.3 In these sources, the-president Ahmadinejad is the targeted via Jaafari, despite the complicated relationship between the two. [Robert Mackey, Ahmadinejad Was Slapped by General, Leaked Cable Says (The New York Times, January 3, 2011; http://www.rferl.org/content/article/1078520.html http://iranpulse.al-monitor.com/index.php/tag/mohammad-ali-jafari/] Using Jaafari as a club to beat the current Rouhani government with is even more absurd. Finally, it is hard to imagine the Revolutionary Guards of Iran going for world conquest after having been defeated by a country with a third of its population but well supported by its rivals in a punishing war.

Iran’s President Rouhani stood here last week, and shed crocodile tears over what he called “the globalization of terrorism.” Maybe he should spare us those phony tears and have a word instead with the commanders of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards. He could ask them to call off Iran’s global terror campaign, which has included attacks in two dozen countries on five continents since 2011 alone.

Of course, this claim is not documented. If we look at all the countries the Islamic Republic of Iran is accused of carrying out terroristic acts in, according to Wikipedia, even assuming all the accusations of are true, it is hard to see how they add up to two dozen.

To say that Iran doesn’t practice terrorism is like saying Derek Jeter never played shortstop for the New York Yankees.

This bemoaning of the Iranian president of the spread of terrorism has got to be one of history’s greatest displays of doubletalk.

Three points here.

First, the State of Israel has carried out many assassinations, including (apparently) murders of Iranian scientists, many of whom had not relationship to any conceivable nuclear weapons program. While many of the targets were understandable (Nazi war criminals, terrorists who targeted civilians), many of them were purely political. And then there is the matter of Israel’s use of massive violence, often against civilian targets, to force its neighbors to, for instance, crack down on Palestinian fedayeen activity.

Second, the IRI is desperately afraid of ISIS and what it represents. This is a legitimate concern which Iran shares with the rest of the world. IRI is simply doing what most other countries do–turn a blind eye to its own acts of terrorism and focus on acts of terrorism which target it and its own interests.

Finally, comparing, for example, an amateurish attack allegedly backed by the IRI on an Israeli target in Bulgaria with ISIS atrocities is ridiculous.

Now, some still argue that Iran’s global terror campaign, its subversion of countries throughout the Middle East and well beyond the Middle East, some argue that this is the work of the extremists. They say things are changing. They point to last year’s elections in Iran.

They claim that Iran’s smooth talking President and Foreign Minister, they’ve changed not only the tone of Iran’s foreign policy but also its substance. They believe Rouhani and Zarif genuinely want to reconcile with the West, that they’ve abandoned the global mission of the Islamic Revolution.

Really? So let’s look at what Foreign Minister Zarif wrote in his book just a few years ago: We have a fundamental problem with the West, and especially with America. This is because we are heirs to a global mission, which is tied to our raison d’etre… A global mission which is tied to our very reason of being.

And then Zarif asks a question, I think an interesting one. He says: How come Malaysia [he’s referring to an overwhelmingly Muslim country–Netanyahu] – how come Malaysia doesn’t have similar problems? And he answers: Because Malaysia is not trying to change the international order.

And now I’m going into a digression about Mr. Zarif’s book, Aqaye Safir (Mr. Ambassador). A translation of his book is scheduled to appear in a few months, and readers of this article can refer to it and make up their own minds. First, what follows is the passage from which Netanyahu quotes:

We have a fundamental problem with the West, particularly with America, because we lay claim to a perspective which has an international dimension. This has nothing to do with how strong we are and refers to the source of our perspective. Why doesn’t Malaysia have these problems? Because Malaysia is not interested in a change in the international order. Perhaps it wants to be independent, promote its own policies, and be powerful, but it describes this power as being the promotion of, say, national welfare. We, too, want national welfare, but we have laid out an international mission, both in the Constitution and in the goals of the Islamic Revolution. Even if we had not laid it out explicitly, such a mission is in our revolution’s essence. This is not necessarily dangerous; indeed, it is a source of strength, just as one of America’s most important sources of strength is its discourse, which was hidden during the Bush administration but which Obama is in the process of restoring.

This international mission gives us strength to be become a regional power. Of course, this does not belong to the current government. In fact, it is the heritage of the efforts of all the post-revolutionary governments. This reality has created serious enemies and rivals for us. The informed know that we are not interested in a nuclear bomb. But it raises the question for a researcher as to how a country is prepared to allow itself to be boycotted to acquire a source of energy. A country which has oil is prepared to put this energy source in danger to acquire another energy source, one which might produce only a tenth of the energy oil does. And so this researcher figures that Iran has a security goal and wants to make a bomb. In fact, this general misunderstand which has arisen has resulted in each pursuing the matter according to his own view.

I believe that not only are nuclear weapons dangerous for the region, but for Iran itself. Having nuclear weapons will neither make Iran secure nor serve as a deterrent. On the contrary. the greatest danger is to enter nuclear negotiations in military form and wreck the strategic balance in the world and the region. I think that the country’s higher offices agree with this view. But their [presumably the West’s] behavior, bargaining, and making excuses and some of our bumbling have led to this view. I personally believe that the roots of this problem can be this same misunderstanding, and not that Iran is actually pursuing nuclear weapons.4

Elsewhere, he writes of his strategy:

Mr. Kissinger believes that when we were determined to begin relations, the two parties first had to know their respective partner’s views on the further of their relations. In other words, for instance, the Americans had to know that China was not pursuing the elimination of America and the Chinese, for their part, had the same expectations of the Americans. When this stage concluded, only then could ping pong diplomacy help in confidence building. If course, we had conjunctural collaboration with America, but the two parties were never able to say, “Our perspective of our future relations is that we will, say,l always have differences with you, but do not pursue your overthrow or make military threats against you. This example which I just gave never took form in Iranian-American relations. Moreover, all the cooperation between the two countries, even though they had vastly positive results for them (the overthrow of the Taleban and Saddam, etc.) did not conclude in the improvement of bilateral relations. For example, in the Afghan War, Pakistan’s intelligence services fed the Americans 100% false information and drew the Northern Alliance forces positions on a map as Taleban positions and showed it to them. It might be unbelievable that these same all-mighty Americans, with all their intelligence, were deceived by Pakistan’s weak intelligence and wanted to attack these Northern Alliance positions. Our timely intervention, along with the field intelligence of the relevant officer stopped them… Or during the Second Iraq War, which led to Saddam’s overthrow, the Israel Lobby and the Arab Lobby wanted to direct the lust for power of Mr. Bush and the Neoconservatives towards Iran instead of Iraq. Of course, thanks to God’s grace, our political activity prevented this from happening. Moreover, one cannot claim that positive and confidence-building measures did not lead to any desired results. But for the aforementioned reasons, they did not conclude with any improvement in bilateral relations.5

From here, we see that our ambassador has an eager desire not to destroy the West or even to cow it, but to come to an accomodation with it. Indeed, glancing through the book has convinced me that its author is almost pathetically keen on coming to a mutually-advantageous arrangement with the West in general and the United States in particular, despite being repeatedly rebuffed. Anyone looking for a plan for world domination will come away disappointed. All he wants is a Nixon goes to China type deal.

That’s your moderate. So don’t be fooled by Iran’s manipulative charm offensive. It’s designed for one purpose, and for one purpose only: To lift the sanctions and remove the obstacles to Iran’s path to the bomb. The Islamic Republic is now trying to bamboozle its way to an agreement that will remove the sanctions it still faces, and leave it with the capacity of thousands of centrifuges to enrich uranium. This would effectively cement Iran’s place as a threshold military nuclear power. In the future, at a time of its choosing, Iran, the world’s most dangerous state in the world’s most dangerous region, would obtain the world’s most dangerous weapons.

Netanyahu omits the fact that the West has been leaning on IRI to drastically reduce the number of centrifuges it is allowed to have.6 The speaker then contradicts the claim that it is after weapons, saying that it is after what is conventionally called a “breakout capacity.”

Allowing that to happen would pose the gravest threat to us all. It’s one thing to confront militant Islamists on pick-up trucks, armed with Kalashnikov rifles. It’s another thing to confront militant Islamists armed with weapons of mass destruction. I remember that last year, everyone here was rightly concerned about the chemical weapons in Syria, including the possibility that they would fall into the hands of terrorists. That didn’t happen. And President Obama deserves great credit for leading the diplomatic effort to dismantle virtually all of Syria’s chemical weapons capability. Imagine how much more dangerous the Islamic State, ISIS, would be if it possessed chemical weapons. Now imagine how much more dangerous the Islamic state of Iran would be if it possessed nuclear weapons. Ladies and Gentlemen, Would you let ISIS enrich uranium? Would you let ISIS build a heavy water reactor? Would you let ISIS develop intercontinental ballistic missiles? Of course you wouldn’t. Then you mustn’t let the Islamic State of Iran do those things either.

Because here’s what will happen: Once Iran produces atomic bombs, all the charm and all the smiles will suddenly disappear. They’ll just vanish. It’s then that the ayatollahs will show their true face and unleash their aggressive fanaticism on the entire world.

But what would IRI do with nuclear weapons? Threatening to drop them on Israel is ludicrous. First, the State of Israel and its Western allies would simply flatten Iran. Second, it would kill more Arabs than all Israel’s wars against its neighbors.

The real danger an IRI bomb would pose would be towards itself. Knowing that a greatly feared and distrusted IRI had a nuclear weapon would put the State of Israel on a hair trigger to retaliate. The first flock of birds flying West over the Jordan River could set off Iran’s nuclear annihilation. Compared to this scenario, the threat such weapons would pose to Israel is negligible.

There is only one responsible course of action to address this threat: Iran’s nuclear military capabilities must be fully dismantled. Make no mistake – ISIS must be defeated. But to defeat ISIS and leave Iran as a threshold nuclear power is to win the battle and lose the war.

This is, of course, what the West’s negotiations with IRI are designed to do.

To defeat ISIS and leave Iran as a threshold nuclear power is to win the battle and lose the war.

A “threshold nuclear power” means a breakout capacity; this is not the same as Netanyahu’s previous claim, that Iran is out to manufacture actual bombs.

Fundamentally, there is no way of satisfying the likes of Netanyahu that Iran is not building a bomb without regime change or totally crippling Iran economically. The Western powers are going through the arduous and delicate task of finding common ground with the Islamic Republic of Iran where none yet exists.

Late last August, one Reza Saiedi sent a message to my old friend Norman Finkelstein requesting a written interview with him:

Dear Norman,

Salam/Shalam

Despite Western attempts to isolate Iran internationally, the upcoming Non-Allied Countries summit will be hosted by Iran. In order to generate greater public awareness of this, I’d like to interview some 50-odd people and would be pleased to include you in the list. In addition, I’d welcome communications with any other scholars and activists that you might be able to introduce to me. If you could provide me with their contact information I’ll contact them directly myself, or perhaps you might forward this post to them.

Thanks for your speedy response. Here are the questions for the interview:

Warm regards,

Reza Saiedi
1- In your opinion what is the importance of Non- Alliance meeting ?

2- Knowing that Iran is organizing the upcoming None Alliance meeting, what is the impact or effects?

3-Would you classify the recent events in Syria as Arab Spring or American-Zionist conspiracy?

4- Perhaps many of you are aware of the recent atrocities directed at Muslims in Burma, however such human rights violations are often blatantly ignored in the mainstream media outlets. Can you offer any insight into the double standard that is applied in these cases, where one country’s violations are ignored while alleged injustices from another (often Iran is mentioned incorrectly/unjustly mentioned) are held under the microscope.

Norman’s answer, and an answer which Mr. Saiedi had solicited from me were not published because the editors were overwhelmed by the work of Non-Aligned Movement conference, according to an email from Mr. Saiedi.

On February 2, 2013, I received another message from Mr. Saiedi asking for a written interview. This time, the questions were:

1. In your opinion, what changes in regional power has occurred as a result of the Islamic Revolution?

2. Is victory of the Islamic Revolution in Iran considered as a challenge to USA?

3. How would you describe differences in pre-Revolutionary Iran and current Iran?

4. Why did both the governments of East and West (ie the US and its allies and the former Soviet Union) make continual efforts to deter the efforts towards completion of establishing the Islamic Republic? A few examples of these efforts include the planned (and failed) helicopter attack in the dessert of Tabbas, initiating the war with Iraq over a bogus border dispute continuing until today’s efforts of supporting regional “revolutions” in Bahrain and Syria.
5. What distinctions can you make between the Islamic Revolution in Iran and the French and Bolshelvic Revolutions?

6. What are similarities can be found between the Islamic Revolution in Iran and other recent regional uprisings, such as the Arab Spring?

7. Could it be said that the recent uprisings and attempts to establish so-called democracies in the region arose as a result of the precedent set by the Islamic Revolution’s overthrow of the Shah’s monarchy?

8. What are the basic disagreements that the West, specifically the USA, holds against the Islamic revolution ?why do they have fear from Islamic revolution? In 1979 , the USA used their utmost pressure to stop Islamic revolution of Iran and today Britain and USA are supporting Bahrain’s government against the populist Islamic revolution. Could you elaborate on this?

9. What is your take on the political position of America in the Region due to recent Arab Spring? do you think their position has been shattered?

10. How do you predict and assess the future revolutions in this region? do you think America will be successful to continue their support of the region’s dictators such as Saudi and Bahrain and others?

Reza Saiedi

PS. Thanks so much Dr Siegle for you kindness.

This time, I’m posting my answer online. I’m posting it in Persian. If anyone wants me to translate it into English, please let me know.

I haven’t weighed in on the artificial debate over the whether or not Islamic Republic of Iran (IRI) president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s famous sentence at the October 2005 World without Zionism conference could be translated as, “Israel should be wiped off the map.” The memehas spreadinprogressivecirclesthat there is some grounds for disputing this translation of this slogan. In fact, there is not a scintilla of a doubt that this is a legitimate translation.

Contrary to those who insist that this was a mistranslation fostered by a hostile Western media, this is the

Banner with the slogan by Khomeini about Israel being wiped off the map. It does not contain the English translation. The television screenshot has a crawler says in Arabic “The defensive missile Shahab 3 (surface to surface). September 22, 2003.

standard way the IRI’s own translators rendered this sentence. Even before Ahmadinejad had been elected president in 2005, we have pictures of a military parade in Tehran in which a Shahab 3 missile–a missile which could carry a warhead to Israel–is draped with this quote in Persian with precisely this translation under it. It is hard to mistake the message.

There, the main banner of the event featured Khomeini’s famous statement made after the occupation of the American Embassy (horribly mistranslated!) side by side with the quotation by Khomeini under discussion, complete with the self-same translation into English.

Yet it has become an article of faith among those opposed to Western intervention against Iran that this translation has been crafted by a warmongering media in a bid to prepare the grounds for a military assault on Iran. What is more surprising is that, whereas members of the Islamic Republic’s captive press have presented a straightforward translation of this line, two people who are stalwart opponents of the Islamic Republic have presented tortured means to “explain” it away.

In a May 3, 2006 post, Juan Cole presents the translation, “the occupation regime over Jerusalem should vanish from the page of time.” He seems unaware that the inconveniently accurate translation was not, as he claims, “wire service translations” or “some hurried journalist’s untechnical rendering into English” but, as we have seen, translations provided by the press of the Islamic Republic of Iran itself. He argues that Ahmadinejad “said that the occupation regime over Jerusalem must be erased from the page of time.” But Ahmadinejad was using the common circumlocution for the State of Israel, “the regime occupying Jerusalem”. It is useless to pretend that this means anything else.

Moreover, it is not “the occupation regime” but “the regime occupying.” It is not the occupation which must vanish, but the regime, if we accept this circumlocution. As if driven to illustrate the absurdity of his position, he even says, “Again, Ariel Sharon erased the occupation regime over Gaza from the page of time.” So Ariel Sharon fulfilled Ahmadinejad’s plan but in Gaza and not in Jerusalem. Cute, but it only shows how twisted his translation is. He pointed out that “[T]here is no Persian idiom to wipe something off the map, and that Ahmadinejad has been misquoted.” Of course there isn’t, but to translate a Persian idiom word for word would give an incomprehensible and/or ridiculous-sounding translation. The question is, is the idiom in the target language a faithful rendition of the idiom in the source language. Finally, Ahmadinejad is quoting Khomeini, and Khomeini, who had no hang-ups about using the word “Israel”, used it in his statement, instead of the more politically correct substitute for Israel. Thus, according to Cole, Ahmadinejad changed Khomeini’s dictum from a targeting of Israel itself to the targeting of some of its objectionable institutions. I don’t find this picture of Ahmadinejad trimming the Imam’s beard compelling.

The mistranslated “wiped off the map” quote attributed to Iran’s President has been spread worldwide, repeated thousands of times in international media, and prompted the denouncements of numerous world leaders. Virtually every major and minor media outlet has published or broadcast this false statement to the masses. Big news agencies such as The Associated Press and Reuters refer to the misquote, literally, on an almost daily basis.

A headquarters of the Basij (pro-government militia) carries the slogan, translated as "Israel should be wiped out of the face of the (world)."

that the government has used this translation at its own demonstrations, as demonstrated above. Indeed, I challenge anyone to find an official or semi-official website of the Islamic Republic of Iran which has challenged this translation.

Norouzi then helpfully says that Ahmadinejad was only quoting Khomeini. But what if, at the height of the 2009 protests, the Iranian president had “only” quoted Khomeini as follows:

If, upon having defeated the corrupt regime and destroying this very corrupt obstacle, we acted in a revolutionary fashion and broken the pens of all the mercenary press, shut down all the corrupt neighborhoods, tried their chiefs, declared the corrupt parties banned and given their leaders what they deserved, set up gallows in all the main squares and hung the corrupt upon them, then these problems would never have arisen.

This class of intellectuals must reform itself. Whatever we endure is from this class. I warn these intellectuals that if they don’t mind their own business, I will break their pens and throw them all in the garbage… But they cannot be made into humans… Those who talk about democracy are worse than the Banu Qureiza tribe. They must all be executed… We will crush them all, God willing.

Clearly if Ahmadinejad had quoted Khomeini in calling for giving the protesters the Banu Qureiza treatment–killing all the men and selling the women and children into slavery–this would not be so casually dismissed as expressing “a viewpoint already in place well before he ever took office,” as Norouzi put it.

Norouzi continues arguing that the quotation is for eliminating the regime and not the people. This is a stronger point and, had he focused on arguing it, he might have had a winning case. We’ll return to this later.

Finally, there is Norouzi’s translation, which in its essentials bears a strong resemblance to Cole’s. It goes well until he reaches the compound verb “mahv shavad“, which he claims means “vanish.”

But this is bad grammar and bad vocabulary. shavad is the Persian passive helper-verb. Thus, this compound verb is in the passive. What follows is an error in elementary school grammar. In a passive sentence, the subject is acted upon (x must be vanished, if you insist on using the word “vanish”). But Norouzi is trying to make it an active sentence (x must vanish), which it simply isn’t. Here is a useful reference for a quick review of the English grammar on this matter.

But there is more. In no dictionary I have consulted is “mahv” translated as “vanished”. Steingass–the most compendious Persian-English dictionary there is–translates it as “Erasing, cancelling, obliterating, defacing, annulling, destroying, annihilating; being effaced, obliterated,” etc. The passive form, “mahv shodeh“, is translated as “effaced, obliterated” and the like.

But why should we be interested in Mr. Norouzi’s translation in the first place? If this is his own translation, it is the only translation of his which appears on his website, which is devoted to the memory of Dr. Mohammad Mosaddeq. One would imagine that he would have applied his talents as a translator to familiarize his readers with Dr. Mosaddeq’s true words, or to at least some of the vast literature by or about this great man written in Persian. But there is no sign of this on his site. I felt kind of sorry for the fellow when he was asked to pronounce this disputed sentence in Persian–there was audible panic in his voice as he stumbled in his thick American accent over what I assume was the transliteration of the Persian phrase. Refer to his interview on antiwar.com at 10:40.

The thing is, all this straining at the obvious translation is completely pointless.

First, the Islamic Republic of Iran does not recognize the State of Israel under any form or circumstance. It is for replacing the Israeli State with a “popular Palestinian” one (as Ahmadinejad says in his speech). One can consider this an unhelpful position, but as a sovereign state, Iran is allowed to have it and argue for it. It should be recalled that this was the position of the PLO and the Arab League (“the Three Nos” of the Khartoum conference of the Arab League of September 1967) up until 1974, when it issued its Ten Point Program, Point Two of which was understood by sophisticated observers as a retreat from this position. A minority of Arab states and Palestinian nationalist groups formed the Steadfastness and Confrontation Front in 1977 to resist this trend. If one were to then argue that the current comment is a throwback to a time before the possibility of a peaceful resolution of the Arab-Israel conflict based on mutual recognition, I would answer that the chief obstacle to this on the ground is Israeli intransigence, followed by political miscalculations by the Palestinian leadership.

Second, the phrase appears (as Norouzi and Cole correctly point out) in Ahmadinejad’s speech in the context of a list of regimes which in fact “vanished”. First, Ahmadinejad mentions the Shah’s regime and how it appeared invincible, enjoying the support of all the great powers abroad and a fearsome secret police at home, and yet it vanished. He then mentions “the Eastern empire”, i.e., the Communist bloc, and how it vanished. When he gets to the fall of Saddam, predicted against all odds by Khomeini, he conveniently forgets that it was the American-led coalition which took him down, and rather amusingly gives full credit to the Imam’s occult powers.

It is in this context that Ahmadinejad quotes Khomeini about Palestine. He says that, just as the Imam was right about the Shah, the Soviets, and Saddam, he will be right about Palestine. As Cole correctly points out, there is no prescription here for how it is to happen. Indeed, the context Ahmadinejad provides lends itself to a relatively benign interpretation of the Imam’s saying. (For the speech in which Khomeini used the phrase, see Appendix III.) The Shah’s regime was destroyed by a mass uprising, and, if we take the Imam’s strategy of giving martyrs rather than killing soldiers in order to win the army over, the revolutionaries were relatively non-violent.

The Soviet block and Eastern European Communist states simply crumbled from within. And, of course, Saddam was overthrown by a Western invasion, whether or not this was what the Imam had in mind when he said that Saddam was on his way out. Again, the statement itself is neutral as to means, and the context only increases the ambiguity.

The statement led to predictable reactions in the usual circles. “I have never come across a situation of the president of a country saying they want to . . . wipe out another country,” said Tony Blair. In a joint statement, the European Union leaders “condemned in the strongest terms” the Iranian president’s call, saying it “will cause concern about Iran’s role in the region and its future intentions.” Israeli Deputy Prime Minister Shimon Peres called for Iran’s expulsion from the United Nations over this. Indeed, Israel’s legal eagles have written an indictment accusing Ahmadinejad of incitement to genocide, which this statement, as Cole correctly points out, certainly is not.

This is not to say that the statement was well-advised. Sergei Lavrov, the foreign minister of the Russian Federation, one of Iran’s few friends, called the comment “unacceptable.” [Washington Post, October 28, 2005: “World Leaders Condemn Iranian’s Call to Wipe Israel ‘Off the Map’”]

Again,

The Russian Foreign Ministry itself issued a statement lecturing the Iranian government about the need for “political foresight and pragmatism.” It added, “Propagandist rhetoric should not be used in an explosive region such as the Middle East.

Moreover, the comments made at the said conference do nothing to help a normal depoliticized work to settle the already tense situation around the Iranian nuclear programme.”

Reaction inside Iran itself was cautious, if we accept a report by Nazila Fathi in the New York Times

“Ahmad Nateq Nouri, a senior conservative cleric and member of the Expediency Council … also played down the president’s comments, saying: ”What the president meant was that we favor a fair and long-lasting peace in Palestine,” the Iranian Student News Agency reported.” [This does not show up on the ISNA Persian-language website.] She speculated, “Some analysts have viewed the recent move by the supreme religious leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, to increase the authority of Mr. Rafsanjani, a veteran politician, as part of his effort to limit the political blunders made by President Ahmadinejad.” [October 29, 2005, Nazila Fathi and Warren Hoge, “Iranian President Stands By Call to Wipe Israel Off Map”.]

Those who take seriously the rhetoric, capabilities and ambitions of Ahmadinejad and the Islamic Republic of Iran and those itching for war with Iran have reacted along the same lines.

But consider this: As I mentioned above, Ahmadinejad was not the first to utter the slogan which has caused such panic. Khomeini had said it decades ago, and it seems to have been forgotten (as Cole correctly points out, adding that it had been said while Iran was busily buying weapons from Iran in the mid-eighties!). It next surfaced at a military procession in September 22, 2003 (before Ahmadinejad had been elected), where it was draped over a Shahab 3 missile. Although this received some notice, it was certainly not met with the fear and dread it would later lead to. This is odd, since the Shahab 3 missile was and is capable of landing a payload in Tel Aviv, and thus the slogan had an unmistakably military meaning, whereas Ahmadinejad’s speech certainly was, as I have explained, ambiguous enough on this issue. Yet it was the speech which created an international incident. Indeed, a Google image search found no picture of this preceding Ahmadinejad’s famous speech. Indeed, how many of those who know that Ahmadinejad had uttered these words are even aware that this very slogan had been attached to a Shahab 3 missile at a state military procession? Why is the former forgotten but the latter has exploded into an international incident? I think it is futile to search for a plan or conspiracy. The American media as a whole is not run by memo from a secret steering committee which gives it marching orders like, say, the old Hearst or the new Murdoch press or Fox News. Rather, I think we are seeing in news terms something like a bolt of lightning in meteorology. Just as an accumulation of negative electrical charges gathering in the clouds leads to an explosive flash of lightning at an unpredictable time, so did the accumulation of negative political charges gathering in the political atmosphere lead to an inevitable release, although no one can safely say why it happened when it happened. There is no need to believe that it is contrived or orchestrated, but it is dangerous nonetheless, and an honest answer to it needs to be given.

The simple truth, as Norouzi and Cole point out, is that Ahmadinejad’s pronouncements do not amount to a military program. The IRI at worst is harassing Israel, but does not pose an existential threat, as cooler heads in Israeli military and intelligence establishments understand. As has been explained over and over and over and over, if the IRI launched a serious attack on Israel, Iran would be reduced to rubble within minutes. No one in the War Party has been able to answer that simple fact. The Islamic Republic will be able to wow the rubes with fiery anti-Zionist speeches, it will support its assets in Lebanon and the Palestinian resistance, but nothing qualitative will change. And in any case, the State of Israel is more capable of inflicting pain and suffering on Iran than the IRI is on Israel. As Cole put it,

What is really going on here is an old trick of the warmongers. Which is that you equate hurtful statements of your enemy with an actual military threat, and make a weak and vulnerable enemy look like a strong, menacing foe. Then no one can complain when you pounce on the enemy and reduce his country to flames and rubble.

The Israelis used this tactic very effectively in 1967 when, in order to win Western public opinion (and rally around an otherwise apathetic Israeli public), the State of Israel played up Egyptian dictator Nasser’s blood-curdling calls for Israel’s destruction. There is no reason to think that the Israeli state is doing otherwise with Ahmadinejad’s ranting.

I do not think that there is any necessary utility in telling the truth if all one wants to do is prevail on the field of political combat. The Republican Party’s armies of liarsandspinners have been shown to be extremely effective. And, as the meme under discussion shows, the charge that the War Party is up to its old tricks is enough for otherwise intelligent people to ignore the plain facts. The anti-war forces will rally to their standard in any case. But I feel uncomfortable trafficking in expedient distortions of the truth. It’s corrupting and corrupts us. And, of course, it’s completely unnecessary.

Appendix I

Articles related to this dispute.

[The New York Times October 29, 2005 Saturday Late Edition – Final Iranian President Stands By Call to Wipe Israel Off Map BYLINE: By NAZILA FATHI; Warren Hoge contributed reporting from the United Nations for this article. SECTION: Section A; Column 1; Foreign Desk; Pg. 3 June 11, 2006 Sunday Late Edition – Final Just How Far Did They Go, Those Words Against Israel?]

EVER since he spoke at an anti-Zionism conference in Tehran last October, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran has been known for one statement above all. As translated by news agencies at the time, it was that Israel ”should be wiped off the map.” Iran’s nuclear program and sponsorship of militant Muslim groups are rarely mentioned without reference to the infamous map remark.

Here, for example, is R. Nicholas Burns, the under secretary of state for political affairs, recently: ”Given the radical nature of Iran under Ahmadinejad and its stated wish to wipe Israel off the map of the world, it is entirely unconvincing that we could or should live with a nuclear Iran.”

But is that what Mr. Ahmadinejad said? And if so, was it a threat of war? For months, a debate among Iran specialists over both questions has been intensifying. It starts as a dispute over translating Persian but quickly turns on whether the United States (with help from Israel) is doing to Iran what some believe it did to Iraq — building a case for military action predicated on a faulty premise.

”Ahmadinejad did not say he was going to wipe Israel off the map because no such idiom exists in Persian,” remarked Juan Cole, a Middle East specialist at the University of Michigan and critic of American policy who has argued that the Iranian president was misquoted. ”He did say he hoped its regime, i.e., a Jewish-Zionist state occupying Jerusalem, would collapse.” Since Iran has not ”attacked another country aggressively for over a century,” he said in an e-mail exchange, ”I smell the whiff of war propaganda.”

Jonathan Steele, a columnist for the left-leaning Guardian newspaper in London, recently laid out the case this way: ”The Iranian president was quoting an ancient statement by Iran’s first Islamist leader, the late Ayatollah Khomeini, that ‘this regime occupying Jerusalem must vanish from the page of time,’ just as the Shah’s regime in Iran had vanished. He was not making a military threat. He was calling for an end to the occupation of Jerusalem at some point in the future. The ‘page of time’ phrase suggests he did not expect it to happen soon.”

Mr. Steele added that neither Khomeini nor Mr. Ahmadinejad suggested that Israel’s ”vanishing” was imminent or that Iran would be involved in bringing it about. ”But the propaganda damage was done,” he wrote, ”and Western hawks bracket the Iranian president with Hitler as though he wants to exterminate Jews.”

If Mr. Steele and Mr. Cole are right, not one word of the quotation — Israel should be wiped off the map — is accurate.

But translators in Tehran who work for the president’s office and the foreign ministry disagree with them. All official translations of Mr. Ahmadinejad’s statement, including a description of it on his Web site (www.president.ir/eng/), refer to wiping Israel away. Sohrab Mahdavi, one of Iran’s most prominent translators, and Siamak Namazi, managing director of a Tehran consulting firm, who is bilingual, both say ”wipe off” or ”wipe away” is more accurate than ”vanish” because the Persian verb is active and transitive.

The second translation issue concerns the word ”map.” Khomeini’s words were abstract: ”Sahneh roozgar.” Sahneh means scene or stage, and roozgar means time. The phrase was widely interpreted as ”map,” and for years, no one objected. In October, when Mr. Ahmadinejad quoted Khomeini, he actually misquoted him, saying not ”Sahneh roozgar” but ”Safheh roozgar,” meaning pages of time or history. No one noticed the change, and news agencies used the word ”map” again.

Ahmad Zeidabadi, a professor of political science in Tehran whose specialty is Iran-Israel relations, explained: ”It seems that in the early days of the revolution the word ‘map’ was used because it appeared to be the best meaningful translation for what he said. The words ‘sahneh roozgar’ are metaphorical and do not refer to anything specific. Maybe it was interpreted as ‘book of countries,’ and the closest thing to that was a map. Since then, we have often heard ‘Israel bayad az naghshe jographya mahv gardad’ — Israel must be wiped off the geographical map. Hard-liners have used it in their speeches.”

The final translation issue is Mr. Ahmadinejad’s use of ”occupying regime of Jerusalem” rather than ”Israel.”

To some analysts, this means he is calling for regime change, not war, and therefore it need not be regarded as a call for military action. Professor Cole, for example, says: ”I am entirely aware that Ahmadinejad is hostile to Israel. The question is whether his intentions and capabilities would lead to a military attack, and whether therefore pre-emptive warfare is prescribed. I am saying no, and the boring philology is part of the reason for the no.”

But to others, ”occupying regime” signals more than opposition to a certain government; the phrase indicates the depth of the Iranian president’s rejection of a Jewish state in the Middle East because he refuses even to utter the name Israel. He has said that the Palestinian issue ”does not lend itself to a partial territorial solution” and has called Israel ”a stain” on Islam that must be erased. By contrast, Mr. Ahmadinejad’s predecessor, Mohammad Khatami, said that if the Palestinians accepted Israel’s existence, Iran would go along.

When combined with Iran’s longstanding support for Palestinian Islamic Jihad and Hezbollah of Lebanon, two groups that have killed numerous Israelis, and Mr. Ahmadinejad’s refusal to acknowledge the Holocaust, it is hard to argue that, from Israel’s point of view, Mr. Ahmadinejad poses no threat. Still, it is true that he has never specifically threatened war against Israel.

So did Iran’s president call for Israel to be wiped off the map? It certainly seems so. Did that amount to a call for war? That remains an open question.

The Toronto Star January 15, 2006 Sunday

Foolish Radical Sparks Histrionics

Gwynne Dyer

When the International Atomic Energy Agency confirmed last week that Iran had broken the seals on its nuclear research facility at Natanz, many people reacted as if the very next step was the testing of an Iranian nuclear weapon. In the ensuing media panic, we were repeatedly reminded that Iran’s radical new president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, declared just months ago that Israel should be “wiped off the map.” How could such a lethally dangerous regime be allowed to proceed with its nuclear plans?

But talk is cheap, and not to be confused with actions or even intentions. Ahmadinejad was quoting directly from the founder of Iran’s Islamic revolution, Ayatollah Khomeini. But neither during Khomeini’s life nor in the 16 years since his death has Iran made any effort to wipe Israel off the map, because to do so could mean Iran’s virtual extermination.

Israel has held a monopoly on nuclear weapons in the Middle East since shortly after Ahmadinejad was born, and now possesses enough of them to strike every Iranian AND every Arab city of over 100,000 people simultaneously.

Ahmadinejad’s comment was as foolish, but also ultimately as meaningless, as Ronald Reagan’s famous remark into a microphone that he didn’t know was open: “My fellow Americans, I am pleased to tell you today that I have signed legislation that will outlaw Russia forever. We begin bombing in five minutes.” Nobody doubted Reagan wanted the “evil empire” to be wiped from the face of the earth, but few seriously believed he intended to attack it. Russia had nuclear weapons too, and the U.S. would have been destroyed by its retaliation.

Ahmadinejad was not joking about wanting Israel to vanish, but he was expressing a wish, not an intention, because Iran has been thoroughly deterred for all of his adult life by the knowledge of those hundreds of Israeli nuclear warheads. And Iran would still be deterred if it had a few nuclear weapons of its own, just as Reagan was deterred from striking the Soviet Union even though the U.S. had thousands of the things.

So why would Iran want nuclear weapons at all? Mostly national pride, plus a desire to keep up with the neighbours.

For Iran, nuclear weapons fall into the class of “nice to have” rather than life-or-death necessity. Israel cannot invade it, and even the U.S. would be reluctant to do so: It is a very big, mountainous and nationalistic country. In almost any regional conflict, Iranian nuclear weapons would make it more likely to be a target for attacks, not less. So the Iranians have chipped away at the task of building the scientific and technological basis for a nuclear-weapons program in a desultory way for several decades, without ever getting really serious about it.

That is still the pattern. When the IAEA demanded that Iran explain certain irregularities in its nuclear power research program three years ago, the regime did not respond like North Korea, which immediately ended its membership in the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and went all out to build nuclear weapons as soon as possible. Instead, Iran voluntarily allowed the IAEA to put seals on its nuclear research facilities while it investigated the discrepancies in Iran’s earlier reports.

Now it has removed those seals, although the investigation is still not complete, and plans to resume its research on nuclear power. This will also enhance its capacity to work on nuclear weapons eventually, but that can’t be helped.

The current U.S. campaign to impose United Nations sanctions on Iran is doomed to fail, because it is not breaking the law. As a signatory of the NPT, it is fully entitled to develop nuclear power for peaceful purposes, including the technology for enriching uranium, even though that also takes it much of the way to a nuclear-weapons capability. In any case, it is practically unimaginable that all the veto-holding powers on the UN Security Council would agree to impose sanctions on a major oil-producer on the mere suspicion that it ultimately intends to break the law.

And there is no need for such a dramatic confrontation. Iran has never been in a great rush to get nuclear weapons. Even if the CIA is unduly optimistic in assuming that Tehran is still 10 years away from a bomb (and the spooks usually err in the pessimistic direction), there is still plenty of time and room for patient negotiation, and no need for the current histrionics.

Gwynne Dyer is a Canadian journalist based in London whose articles are published in 45 countries.

I consider supporting the plan for Israeli independence and recognizing it a disaster for the Muslims and an explosion for the Islamic governments.

The usurping government of Israel, because of the goals it has, is a great danger for Islam and the Muslims’ countries.

Our brothers and sisters must know that America and Israel are enemies of the foundations of Islam.

The idiotic conceit of a Greater Israel drives them to every kind of crime.

The fraternal Arab nations, our brothers of Lebanon and Palestine, should know that whatever misfortune they suffer is due to Israel and America.

Israel must be wiped off the face of the earth. [اسرائیل باید از صفحه روزگار محو شود.]

It is the duty of every Muslim to equip himself against Israel.

Those who support Israel must know that they are strengthening a viper by supporting it.

Do not take the side of Israel, that enemy of Islam and the Arabs, for if this coiled viper gets access to them, it will spare no one among you, great or small.

We reject Israel and will have nothing to do with it. It is a usurping government and our enemy. We will not have relations with Israel, since it is usurping and in a state of war with the Muslims.

Israel is rejected by us and we shall never send it oil or recognize it in any way.

Until the Islamic and abased nations of the world rise up against the arrogant of the worked and their offspring, especially usurping Israel, they will not remove their criminal hands from them.

Israel is a usurper and must leave Palestine as soon as possible. The only solution is for our Palestinian brothers to destroy this corrupt element and uproot colonialism from the region in order to restore tranquility to it.

It is the obligation of the zealous nation of Iran to block American and Israeli interests from Iran and attack them.

The Islamic countries must use oil and whatever other resources they have at their disposal as a weapon against Israel and the colonialists.

This corrupt matter which is in the midst of the Islamic countries, with the support of the major powers threatens the Islamic countries every day with its corrupt proxies and roots. It must be uprooted through the zeal of the Islamic countries and great nations.

The first Shahab-3 missile, using liquid and solid fuel, was successfully test-fired on the first day of the Holy Defence Week. Announcing the news, the minister of defence and armed forces logistics said: The missile was built and tested for the purpose of gaining the necessary technology in order to enter the design and production stage of satellite guidance systems Persian: samane-haye ranesh-e mahvareh.

Vice-Admiral Shamkhani added: The Shahab-3 missile has no military use and only for achieving the preliminary stages of new non-military operations.

The Haaretz daily said the test of the Shahab-3 was conducted last week and was the most successful of seven or eight launches over the past five years.

The newspaper said the Shahab-3 has a range of more than 812 miles.

Israel’s army chief, Lt. Gen. Moshe Yaalon, will discuss the threat posed by Iran when he meets with U.S. defense officials next week, Haaretz said.

Israeli Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom said Friday that he hoped the International Atomic Energy Agency and international powers would pressure Iran to allow weapons inspectors into the country and to sign nonproliferation agreements guaranteeing that it has no intention to develop nuclear weapons.

“The radical regime in Iran is threatening the stability not only of the state of Israel, but the European countries also,” Shalom said. “Iran is a danger to the stability of all the world.”

Earlier this week, the head of the country’s atomic energy organization, Gholamreza Aghazadeh, was quoted by Iranian media as saying Iran was ready to sign additional agreements to prove it did not intend to develop nuclear weapons, but only under certain conditions. It’s not clear what criteria would satisfy Iran.

It’s not clear how effectively the Shahab-3 missile would be in delivering a chemical, biological or nuclear payload. The missile is a modified version of North Korea’s Nodong-1 surface-to-surface missile.

Agence France Presse — English

July 7, 2003 Monday

Israel ‘very concerned’ about Iranian ballistic missile test

BYLINE: JACQUES PINTO

DATELINE: JERUSALEM, July 7

Iran’s confirmation that it has tested a ballistic missile which is within range of Israel, reinforces fears that the regime in Tehran represents the biggest threat to the Jewish state since the downfall of Saddam Hussein.

Israel said it was “very concerned” Monday after Iran confirmed it had conducted a final test of its Shahab-3 ballistic missile capable of hitting its territory.

“We are very concerned, especially since we know that Iran is seeking to acquire the nuclear weapon,” government spokesman Avi Pazner told AFP.

“We informed our American and European friends of our concern. Everything must be done to prevent Iran from acquiring the nuclear weapon. The combination of the Shahab-3 and the nuclear weapon would be a very serious threat on the stability of the region,” he added.

Iran earlier confirmed it had conducted a final test of its Shahab-3, a medium-range ballistic missile that has a range of 1,300 kilometres (810 miles) and can reportedly carry a warhead of between 700 and 1,000 kilograms (2,222 pounds).

Israel warned against the “Iranian threat” in May 2002, following a previous test of the Shahab-3 missile.

According to the Israeli daily Haaretz, the issue is due to be discussed by Israeli chief of staff Moshe Yaalon during a visit to Washington this week.

“The latest tests of the Shahab-3 confirm the concerns Israel had over the development of Iran’s ballistic arsenal and fears over its intentions,” Israeli analyst Mark Heller told AFP.

“The real danger lies in the development of its nuclear program and Israel relies mainly on the United States to deal with this threat,” said Heller, from the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies in Tel Aviv.

Both commentators nevertheless ruled out the possibility of a pre-emptive Israeli strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities, such as Israel’s 1981 air raid against the Iraqi nuclear plant of Osirak.

“The operational conditions are not the same. Iran has learnt lessons from Osirak. Its nuclear facilities, such as missile-launchers, are buried deep inside Iranian territory and scattered over a wide area,” Heller pointed out.

“The geostrategic situation in the region has completely changed, with the presence of US troops in Iraq. And the international community is more concerned with the Iranian nuclear threat than it was with the Iraqi program,” Feldman explained.

Since Saddam Hussein’s regime fell on April 9, Iran — which in 2002 US President George W. Bush described as forming part of an “axis of evil” together with Iraq and North Korea — has become the Jewish state’s enemy number one.

Israel broke diplomatic relations with Iran in 1979 after the fall of the Shah and the creation of the Islamic republic, which it accuses of supporting anti-Israeli terrorism.

In January 2002, the Israeli navy intercepted a ship carrying 50 tonnes of arms, which the Jewish state charged were sent by Iran to Palestinian militant organizations.

Tehran is accused of financing the Lebanon-based Shiite militia Hezbollah, as well as several radical Palestinian groups, such as Hamas and Islamic Jihad.

Despite breaking off diplomatic relations with Iran after the collapse of the Shah’s regime, Israel has nevertheless maintained shadowy relations with the Islamic Republic, supplying it with arms during its 1980-1988 war with Iraq.

Defence Minister Ali Shamkhani on Wednesday defended Iran’s testing of a ballistic missile capable of hitting arch-foe Israel, saying the army needed to be assured the device was functional.

“Naturally, when a product is made, it needs to be tested so it can be delivered.

Such a test creates confidence for the buyer,” the rear admiral and minister told the Iranian student news agency ISNA.

He also shrugged off US fears over the Shahab-3 medium-range missile which is based on North Korea’s No-Dong and Pakistan’s Ghauri-II and has a range of 1,300 kilometers (810 miles).

“If the Americans are angry after the Shahab-3, they can die angry,” Shamkhani was quoted as saying.

On Monday, the Iranian foreign ministry confirmed the Islamic republic had conducted a final test of its Shahab-3, and said the ballistic missile could now be turned over to the armed forces.

In response the White House said Iran’s missile and alleged unconventional arms programmes threatened global stability and security, and that it was working with allies to defuse the danger.

BBC Monitoring Middle East – Political

Supplied by BBC Worldwide Monitoring

December 16, 2003 Tuesday

Iran says it will tweak Shahab-3, not develop long-range missiles

DATELINE: TEHRAN

Iran’s military does not intend to develop long-range ballistic missiles but will instead concentrate on tweaking its existing Shahab-3 medium-range missile, a senior official was quoted as saying.

“Iran does not have any plan to build a Shahab-4. Instead we are optimising the Shahab-3,” said Hossein Dehqan, a deputy to Defence Minister Ali Shamkhani.

Tehran finalised its testing of the Shahab-3 in June. The missile is thought to be capable of carrying a 1,000 kilogramme (one-ton) warhead at least 1,300 kilometers (800 miles) — therefore bringing arch-enemy Israel within range.

Shahab is Farsi for “meteor” or “shooting star”.

Six Shahab-3 missiles were paraded in Tehran in September during the festivities marking the outbreak of the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war, and one of them carried a banner declaring “We will wipe Israel from the map”.

The Shahab-3 is believed to be derived from technology acquired from North Korea and Pakistan.

Iran said Tuesday it would destroy Israel’s Dimona nuclear reactor if the Jewish state were to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities. A senior commander warned that Iranian missiles could reach Dimona.

“If Israel fires a missile into the Bushehr nuclear power plant, it has to say goodbye forever to its Dimona nuclear facility, where it produces and stockpiles nuclear weapons,” said the deputy chief of the elite Revolutionary Guards, Brig. Gen. Mohammad Baqer Zolqadr, in a statement.

Zolqadr was referring to the site of Iran’s first nuclear reactor at Bushehr, a coastal town on the Gulf. Built with Russian assistance, the reactor is due to come on stream in 2005.

Iran says its nuclear program is strictly for the generation of electricity. But Israel and the United States strongly suspect Iran is secretly building nuclear weapons.

Israel has not threatened to attack the Bushehr reactor, but it has said it will not allow Iran to build a nuclear bomb. In 1981, Israeli fighter-bombers destroyed a nuclear reactor that was under construction outside Baghdad because it feared Iraq would acquire a nuclear weapon.

Israel has never confirmed nor denied having nuclear weapons. But it is widely believed to be a nuclear power. Its reactor at Dimona in the Negev Desert is said to be the source of plutonium for its alleged nuclear warheads.

Zolqadr did not say how Iran would attack Dimona, but the head of the Revolutionary Guards’ political bureau, Yadollah Javani, said Iran would use its Shahab-3 missile.

“All the territory under the control of the Zionist regime, including its nuclear facilities, are within the range of Iran’s advanced missiles,” Javani said in a separate statement.

Iran announced last week it had successfully test-fired a new version of the Shahab-3, which has a range of 1,296 kilometers (about 810 miles). Israel is about 965 kilometers (600 miles) west of Iran.

U.S. officials say the missile, whose name means shooting star in Farsi, is based on the North Korean “No Dong” rocket. Iran says Shahab-3 is entirely Iranian-made.

Israel has developed with the United States the Arrow anti-ballistic missile system. It is said to be capable of intercepting and destroying missiles at high altitudes.

Iran showed off its range of ballistic missiles at an annual military parade on Tuesday, with the rockets draped in banners vowing to “crush America” and “wipe Israel off the map”.

A banner stating “Israel must be wiped off the map” was draped on the side of a Shahab-2 missile, while a banner saying “We will crush America under our feet” was on the side of a trailer carrying the latest Shahab-3 missile.

The parade marks the beginning of “Sacred Defence Week”, an event commemorating Iraq’s 1980 attack on Iran and the outset of the bloody eight-year war.

“The Shahab-3 missiles, with different ranges, enables us to destroy the most distant targets,” said an official commentary accompanying the parade, which was carried live on state television.

“These missiles enable us to destroy the enemy with missile strikes,” the commentary said, without giving any specific details on the range of the missiles.

The Shahab-3 is Iran’s most advanced missile, and is touted as being capable of hitting arch-enemy Israel.

Iran showed off six of its Shahab-3 ballistic missiles in a military parade on Thursday, with the rockets sporting banners reading “Death to America”, “We will crush America under our feet” and “Israel must be wiped off the face of the earth”.

“The Shahab-3 missile is the symbol of our strength and of the authority of Iran,” a commentator said as the missiles and launchers rolled slowly past hardline President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

The parade marks the start of “Sacred Defence Week”, dedicated to the hundreds of thousands of Iranians killed after the forces of former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein invaded in 1980.

Iran has been constantly upgrading the Shahab-3 missile. The single-stage device is believed to be based on a North Korean design and thought to have a range of at least 2,000 kilometres (1,280 miles) — meaning arch-enemy Israel and US bases in the region are well within range.

In Farsi, Shahab means “meteor” or “shooting star”.

Tehran’s rapid progress on its ballistic missile programme is a major cause for concern among the international community, particularly Israel, which is already alarmed over Iran’s nuclear activities.

Iran refuses to recognise Israel and official dogma calls for the destruction of the Jewish state.

But the clerical regime here insists it is not seeking to develop missiles with a longer range than the Shahab-3, and has denied allegations that it is seeking to develop nuclear weapons. The country says its missiles will only be tipped with conventional warheads.

In May, Iran announced it had successfully tested a new solid fuel motor for the missile, a technological breakthrough given that the missile had initially been designed to work with less stable and less mobile liquid fuel.

In practice, that means the Shahab-3 missiles can be spread across the country and stored far from any refueling facilities in preparation for immediate deployment.

JANE’S DEFENCE WEEKLY

May 31, 2006 Wednesday
IRAN’S SHAHAB 3 IN LATEST TEST

BYLINE: ALON BEN-DAVID

Iran test-launches Shahab 3 medium-range ballistic missile; Western intelligence agencies observed no improvement or changes in flight profile, though Iran has claimed in recent months that 1,300 km range has been extended to 2,000 km; test was carried out hours before Pres Bush met with Israeli Prime Min Ehud Olmert to discuss potential ballistic missile threat from Iran; Iran is believed to have assembled and deployed North Korean BM-25 intermediate-range ballistic missiles, which have range of 2,500-4,000 km (M)

Pro-government Iranians who didn’t get the memo. (In chronological order.)

"Iranian protesters, mainly members of the Basij Islamic militia, holds (sic) up a sign during a protest against the war in Iraq 12 April 2003 for the sixth consecutive day outside the British embassy in Tehran.

Pictures from the Qods Day, October 28, 2005, the last Friday in Ramadan so declared by Ayatollah Khomeini.

"Iranians walk over an anti-Israel poster during an anti-Israel rally on Friday, Oct. 28, 2005 in Tehran. Tens of thousands of Iranians stated anti-Israel protests across the country Friday and repeated calls by their ultraconservative president demanding the Jewish state's destruction. World leaders have condemned remarks made Wednesday by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who repeated the words of the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, founder of Iran's Islamic revolution, by saying: "Israel must be wiped off the map." (AP, October 28, 2005)

"Iranians attend an anti-Israel rally marking 'Al-Quds Day' (Jerusalem Day) to support the Palestinian cause in Tehran, Iran, Friday, Oct. 28, 2005. Tens of thousands of Iranians staged anti-Israel protests across the country Friday and repeated calls by their ultraconservative president who repeated the words of the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, founder of Iran's Islamic revolution, by saying: "Israel must be wiped off the map." (AP, October 28, 2005)

Qods Day demonstration, 2005 (AP, October 28, 2005)

Other venues.

"Iranian paramilitary militias (Basij) walk past an anti-Israel banner during a rally of paramilitary forces to support of (sic) Iran's nuclear programs in Tehran, Iran, Saturday, Nov. 24, 2005. On the banner at right is a picture of Iran's late leader Ayatullah Khomeini." (AP, November 24, 2005)

"An Iranian woman walks past a banner repeating the famous quote by the founder of Iran's Islamic revolution Ayatollah Khomeini,"Israel must be wiped out of the world" in downtown Tehran, 30 July 2006. At least 52 civilians, including 30 children, were killed in Israeli raids on a shelter in the southern Lebanese village of Qana yesterday, fuelling anger at the Jewish sthate's military onslaught and giving tragic new impetus to ceasefire plans." (AFP, July 30, 2006)

"An Iranian Basiji student looks at a poster featuring portraits of (L-R) of Israeli military intelligence chief General Amos Yadlin, Mossad chief Meir Dagan and Defence Minister Ehud Barak during an anti-Israeli ceremony in Tehran on March 9, 2008." (AFP, March 9, 2008)

Your valuable cinematic work, sir, which has enjoyed widespread approval of the good and wise Iranian audience and has now been recognized on an international scale and has become a source of pride for yourself and our dear country, is a sign of success for our noble and valuable cinema and the lofty cultural potention of the great Iranian nation and an expression of how genuine artistic productions are not limited by borders.

I hope that we will always witness the appearence of prominent works in all cultural, artistic, and scientific fields. Allow me to ask you, sir, and all your dear colleagues and the esteemed cinematographers and artists of Iran to never tire or or cease working.